Microsoft Network client for MS-DOS can produce a local LPT device
that gets redirected over the MS networking stuff (CIFS/SMB over
TCP/IP) to a server. Which can be Windows or Linux.
The next question is, what species of an animal your USB printer is.
Decent printers accept popular print job formats such as PCL or
PostScript. Old printers could often also print raw TXT.
Cheap USB printers either need host-based software to control them,
or use obscure print job formats.
With a good quality printer, all you need is an off-the-shelf
"printserver" (or the printer actually has an Ethernet port built
in).
For cheap USB printers, chances are that you will find a driver for
Linux, interoperable with CUPS, which can accept jobs from Samba.
CUPS with a HW-specific printer driver can take print jobs in some
open data format and spoonfeed them to the retarded USB printer in
its obscure native format. I.e. CUPS can work as a print job data
format converter. You won't get this functionality in native DOS. In
DOS, you need a printer that supports some data format that you can
produce from your app.
BTW the Samba service (daemon) in Linux or BSD can also hand over
print jobs to the "legacy" BSD style print service called "lpd",
which is not much consolation / advantage in this scenario.
Frank
To: "freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net"
<freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net>
Date sent: Sat, 27 Jul 2024 13:41:46 +0000
Subject: [Freedos-user] Printing to USB Printers
From: Michael Perry via Freedos-user <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net>
Send reply to: "Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS."
<freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net>
Copies to: Michael Perry <spookyb...@outlook.com>
Using FreeDOS 1.3 on bare metal. Yes, I know that USB came well after
DOS's golden years.
All of the parallel to USB adapters I've seen require Windows
drivers. I tried USBPRINT without success (although USBDRIVE works
great to copy files to a UBS drive.) And I'm not interested in
running virtual DOS machine in Linux.
What workarounds - if any - are there to printing on today's USB
Printers?
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